“There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays. This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. Growing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. The board’s mission - to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth - has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. Working against the clock - “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled - the playwright hit a wall. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget. The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S.
In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play.
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